East Africa Tech

  When people think about artificial intelligence in retail, they often picture customer service chatbots answering questions about deliveries or recommending products. Those tools are certainly becoming more common, but they're only scratching the surface of how AI is changing retail across East Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa loses more food between harvest and retail than any other region in the world , with roughly 23% of production never reaching a shelf, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. That single statistic captures why AI's real value in East African commerce has little to do with chatbots: the biggest wins come from fixing what happens between the farm and the store. The region's most ambitious commerce companies are deploying AI much earlier in the value chain. They're using it to forecast demand, optimise delivery routes, improve inventory planning, reduce food waste, assess merchant creditworthiness, and make supply chains more effi...